The way of all flesh

That’s just part of the teaching of Catholicism. As we all know, the Italian navigator Cristoforo Colombo named our blessed island La Trinidad — meaning the Trinity — three persons in one God. Since we are on the religious scene, the Christian flock led the way with 60 percent (Catholics 32 percent plus Protestants 28 percent). Next is Hinduism with 24 percent followed by Islam with six percent. The Chambers Fact Finder-2006 goes on:- none/unaffiliated five percent and, finally “others” five percent.

Well, “‘All Saints” and “All Souls” remind us of those who have gone the way of all flesh — “Gone to graveyards everyone.” But billions believe that the soul returns to the Creator from whence it came. Some have on their tombstones, epitaphs simply stating the name followed by the dates of birth and death. In the fifth century BC, a Greek poet Simonides of Ceos, composed these lines to honour Spartan heroes killed in the battle of Thermopylae: “Go, tell the Spartans, gentle passer-by, /That here, obedient to their law, we lie.”

In complete contrast, we have on a tombstone, in Bath Abbey, the words, “Here lies Ann Mann, /She lived an old maid / And died an old Mann” — Anonymous. Ambrose Bierce came up with, “Beneath this mound Charles Crocker now reposes; / Step lightly, strangers — also hold your noses.”

This is the epitaph on a tombstone in Devon, “Here lie I by the chancel door; / They put me here because I was poor: /The further in, the more you pay,/ But here lie as snug as they.” — Author unknown. On a more serious note, the English-born American poet, WH Auden created this for an Unknown Soldier, “To save your world you asked this man to die: / Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?”

The first official poet laureate of the UK John Dryden composed this for his wife, “Here lies my wife: so let her lie! /Now she’s at rest, and so am I.” John Gay, composer of “The Beggar’s Opera,” wrote the following for his tombstone, “Life is a jest, and all things show it./ I thought so once; but now I know it.

The young doctor, John Keats, left us with these words, “The poetry of the earth is never dead” and “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” The poor poet never had enough money to marry the girl he loved Fanny Brawne. Keats considered himself a failure, and wrote only one line for his gravestone, — “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson, Scottish poet / essayist / novelist, author of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Kidnapped, came up with, “Under the wide and starry sky / Dig the grave and let me lie.”

Some poetry afficionados say that the greatest English poem is Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. It begins with the unforgettable words, “The curfew tolls the knell of parting day.”

William Shakespeare also wrote his own epitaph. In 1962, I read it on his tombstone in the Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-on-Avon. It has already been quoted but it is interesting to note that it ends with “And cursed be he that moves my bones.”

The English professor asked his class, “Can anyone tell us what two letters in the alphabet, Shakespeare never used?” Not a hand went up. He explained, “Shakespeare died in 1616. It was not until 1632, the letters J and V were introduced in the English language.